I just really hate this XMR bully whale. I watch as he/she/it ruthlessly works the stack for profit, using their hundreds of thousands of Monero to (try to) force holders to capitulate their positions, all the while scraping the asks and picking up cheaper ones - before releasing their price suppression walls just long enough to bully down any new exuberance.
You say consolidation is good, but what is not good is when a community can't even discern something's true price because it constantly gets forcefully manipulated. I just long for the day when one of the Bitcoin whales decides to make a grand entry into Monero and soaks up every single XMR being used for price suppression for good.
Until then the only answer is for HODL'ers not to give these tactics a single inch. Buy every spot Monero you can afford, attack fake ask walls when you see them, and never try to flip out of a position to get a lower price. If we as a community show these asses that these tactics aren't profitable, they'll stop.
I've been a daily reader of this thread for a couple of months now but I'm not a trader and though I've tried to understand what's going in Poloniex, it is still something of a mystery to me even though I watch it assiduously .
SoI have a couple of questions if you don't mind.
First, what is the effect of a 'buy' and 'sell' wall? What does it do, and what does it aim to do - its purpose? Can you give me an example of how it might either raise or lower the price of xmr? How it might affect someone's behavior?
Second, I see many of the other currencies being heavily traded. In the last few days, some seem to have done very well. I don't visit any other threads besides this one, but sometimes I get the impression that someone(s) has it in for Monero - that there is a deliberate intention to keep the price down. Is that just me being paranoid? Would you find, on other currency threads, people complaining about buy and sell walls? Does it happen all over? Could there be a rationale for doing so?
I'm a fairly big holder of Monero so of course I want to see the price go up. I'm also in no hurry for it to do so. But still...
Effects of buy and sell walls: Say you have lots of resources. 1,000 bitcoin, 100,000 monero. Your goal: make more money.
You enter the market, and see that on the books there's a nice curve between buy and sell. No walls are visible on the chart. The current market price (the price around where the buy and sell orders meet) is 0.01. A lot of people are willing to buy monero for cheaper. So to drive the price down to 0.001, it costs you 10,000 xmr. So you do that - you sell some portion of your monero holdings to drive the price down, either in one fell swoop or with bots so it appears "natural". The activity creates a panic in the market, because people see the price dropping, so some decide to sell. You then place a large buy order (a buy wall) at 0.005 with, say, 200 bitcoins. Someone who just watched the market tank will say "im gettin outta this" and then dump into your buy wall. So, at the end of the day, you lost 10k xmr due to your initial market manipulation, but made some BTC doing that, and hopefully got > 10k xmr at 0.005 when people panicked.
Now, to move the market the other way you just do the opposite. You use your bitcoin to move the price from 0.01 to 0.1. Once this creates enough momentum in the market (other people going "whoooa boy we going to the moon!!") you then place a sell order of 5,000 xmr (a sell wall) at 0.05 (or wherever things sorta leveled out). If the manipulation was done right, others in the market will view this as a good time to buy-in and will eat your sell wall at 0.05.
edited to add:
but what really happens with the walls is they define limits. So if there's a sell wall at 0.05, people will place buy orders at 0.049. So you can then dump into their buy order.
edit2: luigi is going to kill me. I fixed my "your"
